


a thousand ways to go

by luminarai



Category: The Get Down (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-12
Updated: 2018-08-12
Packaged: 2019-06-26 11:15:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15662115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luminarai/pseuds/luminarai
Summary: They’ve been staying at their Berlin apartment for exactly two months when Thor almost sets it on fire.





	a thousand ways to go

**Author's Note:**

> For basilhallward.tumblr.com as part of The Get Down fanwork exchange! Hope you enjoy xoxo

They’ve been staying at their Berlin apartment for exactly two months when Thor almost sets it on fire. The place is old enough that it doesn’t actually have a fire alarm – it reminds Dizzee a bit of the shitholes they used to live in back when they first moved in together; who’d have thought he’d ever get nostalgic at the sight of water damaged walls – but the acrid smoke coming in from the kitchen door works well enough. Thor swears and all but flings himself into the kitchen.

Dizzee, who’d been in the middle of receiving a pretty spectacular blowjob, is honestly a bit miffed. Then he figures he should probably go see where all the smoke is coming from and pulls his pants back up before following his boyfriend.

In the dime-sized kitchen Thor has thrown open the narrow glass panes that play at being windows and is throwing something heavy into the running sink beneath in between coughing and swearing. Dizzee feels his eyes tearing up from the harsh smoke and pulls his shirt over his nose the best he can. In hindsight he probably shouldn’t have gone for something with so many rips in it this morning.

Slowly, the thick smoke trickles out, leaving just the acrid scent behind. Dizzee pulls down his shirt again and warily approaches the still-smoking sink.

“Hey, uh, no judgement or anything,” he says and gestures to the two burnt pots in the sink, “but what the fuck is that?”

Thor breathes out a small cough and Dizzee is astonished to see the hint of a blush spreading up over the low neckline of Thor’s shirt.

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing, I was just – trying something,” he mutters, nudging Dizzee out of the way. The kitchen is small enough that taking a few steps back makes you exit the room altogether. Dizzee doesn’t protest, merely tilts his head in a thoughtful fashion.

It could easily have been some sort of art project gone wrong – they’ve experimented with all sorts of styles and materials over the last couple of years, but what kind of art do you make on a stove? The oven is nowhere near hot enough to function as a kiln and besides, you’d never put ceramics in a pot. Melting something, maybe? That wouldn’t quite explain the smell which, though bitter, doesn’t carry the toxic fumes that Dizzee recognizes from other art-related accidents.

It’s kind of familiar, he realizes. It smells kind of like the time where his parents were out of town and Ra-Ra wanted to –

“Wait,” he says with a dawning sense of realization, “are you _cooking_?”

Thor cut his hair at the beginning of the summer and while it still hangs below his ears, it exposes the back of his neck. It’s something Dizzee has taken advantage of many a times, the pale skin there with its light dusting of golden freckles all but calling out to his mouth in a siren song. Now he watches as the strip of flesh flushes perfectly scarlet.

Thor mutters something unintelligible, and Dizzee is so, so confused but also so charmed. It takes a lot to rattle Thor. Dizzee can count the times he’s seen it happen over the last few years on one hand and still have a fingers left over.

Sometimes, he imagines Thor as the star whose gravity keeps him in orbit, tethers him and keeps him grounded. Sometimes, he traces the invisible star on Thor’s abdomen and knows it to be true.

This is not quite a rattling but it’s close enough to be noticeable. He steps up behind his boyfriend and slips his arms around his firm waist, hooks his chin over a broad shoulder. Thor sighs and relaxes back into him, molding them together perfectly. He smells like skin and a bit like sweat and the paints they used this morning. Dizzee probably smells exactly the same, and that thought is as comforting as it is exciting, the two of them the same in their very essence.

God, it’s been years already, but the brush of Thor’s hair against his face still makes Dizzee live up to his namesake.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” he murmurs.

“It’d be easier if I hadn’t just burnt everything to shit. I just wanted to make something nice, is all.”

“You make something nice all the time,” Dizzee says. Somehow he knows that’s not what Thor means, though. “Besides, how much cooking have you done in your life?”

Thor snorts and Dizzee presses a grin into his shoulder. They’re both well aware that he has done approximately jack shit cooking in his life. From growing up with maids to years of boarding school and then slumming it in squats and friends’ apartments, the closest Thor has been to cooking has been helping Dizzee’s mom chop vegetables at family dinners.

Not that Dizzee is much better; after the third time he cut his fingers spacing out while helping his mom, she’d proclaimed him a lost cause in the kitchen. Not that Dizzee had minded. Then, moving in with Thor, it had been sandwiches and whatever take-out that they could afford for a while.

Even after the money began rolling in – and isn’t that the biggest mindfuck ever, that rich white people now pay for the same thing they’d been willing to let them rot in prison for just a few years earlier? – food hadn’t been a priority, not really. It just meant not having to worry about their next meal.

Sometimes he misses his mom’s cooking like nothing else. It’s been over a year since they left the US, and Dizzee tries to keep up, he really does, writes long rambling letters and telephones whenever he can which isn’t nearly often enough.

Thor tries his best to understand but he can’t really and he knows it too. Thor never had a sense of belonging to anywhere in particular, not the stuffy house on the Upper West Side or anywhere else. His home is with the people he loves, and as such he finds his home wherever they are.

Dizzee likes their little apartment in Kreuzberg, feels at home amongst the rebels and artists here, but he also feels out of place more than ever. Not like he was back home in New York, ironically. Both here and in Paris, the circles they move in are all chock full of aliens, of extra-terrestrial deities and shapeshifters, speaking in different tongues, dancing to their own silent beats. He loves it.

He doesn’t love the silence that erupts when he enters a room. It was a bit easier in Paris, a bit. In some areas at least. He hates the eyes that follow him, not because they know his name or his art, but because they’re surprised at what they see, trailing his every move like –

He hates the animal analogy, has confessed it to Thor in the quiet minutes between night and dusk, but it’s all he can find to explain it. They watch him like a strange animal, displaced and displayed.

One art consultant, Vivienne, had expressed surprise at the series of cat eyes that has found his way into his art as of late. She was one of the ones who’d brought them to Paris in the first place and she’s been a close friend ever since. He’d never shown interest in the animal kingdom in his art before, she pointed out. He told her that he hadn’t felt it before, either.

“Everybody’s shit at something the first time they do it,” Dizzee finally says. “You know how it goes – ever failed, try again, fail again, fail better.”

Finally, Thor turns around, folding his hands together at the small of Dizzee’s back. “Have you been getting into absurdist fiction again?” he asks mock-concerned. “Besides, I blame this all on you, you know. If you hadn’t gotten me all distracted –“

Dizzee squawks, “Me! You’re tripping, I just came in the door –“

“ – wearing those terrible pants – “

“Hey, I like these pants!”

Thor sighs dramatically and tightens his grip around Dizzee. “They are the worst pants I have ever seen! As a matter of fact, I think you should take them off immediately.”

Dizzee can’t help the laughter that bubbles out of him. “Oh, I see how it is. You’re simply doing the world a favor.”

“Absolutely. You without pants is for the greater good.” He leans in for a teasing kiss, biting at Dizzee’s lower lip. “But let’s get out of the kitchen first, yeah?”

“Yeah, aight,” Dizzee mumbles into his mouth as Thor walks him backwards out of the kitchen, the mess in the sink all but forgotten.

 ---

They spend the morning with Thierry, painting thick blocks of the wall in strange shapes and bursts of color. It feels a little bit like their early years back home, the rush of quick lines, the constant vigilance making every sound grow in your ears. But as it is, it’s deathly quiet; no cars, no people, only the sound of their spray cans. It feels almost wrong painting graffiti in clear daylight

Thierry tells them, in a strange mix of French, German and English, that they don’t have to worry so much about the police on this side. The other side, though, is something else. 

Kreuzberg is closed in on three sides by the wall and from the roof of their building, he and Thor can stare directly over the wall, into the barren death strip between the two walls where only the DDR guards and cleaning squads cross. People like Thierry seem to exist in the strange borderland in and around and between the two sides.

Dizzee is used to invisible borders, to cultural walls that he’s expected to understand from birth. This is an entirely different beast and he spends hours talking to whoever’s willing about the separation, trying to put it into words and images. One leather clad woman offers him a cigarette in a café at half past six in the morning and quietly speaks of families being split apart, of the loss and the unknowing, of _heimweh_ , separating the smoke between them with straight cutting motion of her hand. A guillotine of reinforced concrete. Something thick lodges itself at the back of Dizzee’s throat and he shivers.

Thierry and Christophe and the others have their own styles full of strange animals and figures that they paint onto the wall in thick colorful strips. It’s different from New York, from Paris and all the other places they’ve been so far. Each stroke has something new, something political in their very movement. And this, this is where Dizzee finds himself at ease, becoming one with new lines and colors. Their language is universal.

Still, the guys here remind Dizzee of what he and Thor used to be, back when they had no money and had to fight for everything they had. Their current success affords them both compliments and derision from other street artists who can never seem to be able to decide whether the two of them _made it_ or simply sold out.

Dizzee doesn’t really give a fuck either way, he finds. He’s got shit to paint and a man to love. It’s enough.

He falls asleep around midday, too used to running on his own schedule to remember the last time he had to get up early, and strangely tired besides. He wakes up a few hours later to the smell of coffee and toasting bread.

Toasting, not burning. Small steps, he thinks with a smile, and stretches luxuriously in the tangled sheets. Thor has the radio on, singing along to David Bowie in his sweet tenor, and Dizzee dozes a little longer. He’s in that space where dreams creep into the edges of reality when the mattress next to him dips.

“Sleep well?” Thor asks him, letting Dizzee sit up against the wall before settling down next to him and handing him a cup of coffee. Dizzee hums around its rim, letting Thor rearrange his locs so they’re not sticking up all over the place before he presses a kiss to his temple.

The plate full of grilled cheese that Thor hands him is near-perfection. But then, perfection comes from Adele Kipling’s kitchen and those are crazy high standards to live up to, if you ask Dizzee. He chews slowly to properly appreciate it.

“You’re getting a hang of this cooking thing,” he says, nudging Thor with his shoulder. “It’s really good.”

“It’s just grilled cheese,” Thor says but he’s pleased, Dizzee can tell.

“Grilled cheese is an art form in and of itself,” Dizzee informs him grandly, nearly sloshing coffee all over the sheets. “Oh, shit.”

Thor laughs. “So’s eating in bed. Here.” He puts the coffee on the window sill. “The bread here’s all weird. And the cheese. Plus, it’s really weird following a recipe when you have to find them in _deutsch_. Things have weird names.”

“ _Sehr, sehr_ weird,” Dizzee sighs around a mouthful of toast.

“I think it’s _seltsam_ , technically.”

“We’re dumb Americans, how would we know,” Dizzee reminds him. Thor snorts into his own cup of coffee.

“Andreas wants us to stop by the gallery, did I tell you?” Thor asks him once they’ve polished off their small meal. Dizzee just shakes his head, though it’s possible that Thor did tell him. He can’t remember in any case. “He’s really into your panthers. And I guess I can come, too.”

The sentiment could have sounded bitter if not for the fact that it’s _Thor_. There’s nothing but humor in the wry smile Thor gives him, nothing but warmth in his voice. Dizzee has asked him about it before, uncomfortable with the way that people will sometimes ask to talk to just Dizzee, even though he doesn’t understand it. He’s not any better than Thor, after all. Sometimes he thinks he probably wouldn’t even be here to make art, physically as well as metaphorically, if it wasn’t for Thor.

Thor always just shakes his head, with that small smile of his, the one that seems to say that there’s something fundamental Dizzee just doesn’t see.

But sometimes, when Dizzee shows him a new project of his, there’s this light in Thor’s eyes, something excited and amazed, something – proud. And it makes Dizzee understand it, just a little, because he feels the same light whenever Thor leads him over to his own canvasses.

“Wanna go to the studio after?” Dizzee asks. The studio is actually the rooms just below their apartment which the landlady gladly lets them use. According to her, it’d just be taken over by squatters if not for them. With the amount of rent they pay, they almost feel like squatters in the first place. Dizzee has seen holes in the ground in New York with higher rents than this place.

“Nah,” Thor says quietly, turning the mug around in his hands. Dizzee knows he’s working through something or other at the moment – the paint under his nails is just a thin line these days. However, he’s not ready to share it yet so Dizzee just makes sure to be there, ready whenever Thor’s ready.

“How about Dschungel – or maybe Risiko?” Dizzee offers, the most prestigious yet ratty place in town. “Might run into Nick and the others.”

The music scene here is always expanding, experimenting, evolving. It draws both of them in. None of the guys from back home would get this kind of music; he can’t even imagine Shao or Zeke in the audience of the places they frequent, feeling the crazy basslines in their bones. Though Shao might appreciate some of the industrial stuff, if only for its cutting and mixing potential. The punk – eh. Probably not.

Thor takes his hand, coffee-warmed fingers sliding perfectly into the spaces between Dizzee’s. “Sure, let’s do that,” he says, as if he doesn’t know exactly what Dizzee’s doing, luring him out with the promise of meeting up with people that he likes. Thor’s always been more sociable, thriving in big crowds. Dizzee’s not above using it for the greater good.

Besides, the clubs in Schöneberg are some of the places where Dizzee just seems to mix in seamlessly. Their audiences are wild mixes of ethnicities, sexualities, and styles. In their chaos, he feels at ease. 

He probably tastes of cheese and coffee but Thor doesn’t protest when Dizzee puts the rest of their dishes aside and gracelessly wiggles into his lap to plant one on him. Instead he just tugs on one of the golden charms in Dizzee’s hair – probably the one with a little lightning bolt attached to it that Dizzee got specifically to make him smile in that goofy way Dizzee loves – and burrows into his warmth.

Dizzee traces forgotten symbols into Thor’s broad back through his thin t-shirt and they sit just like that for a long while until Thor starts complaining about his legs falling asleep. He still takes his time removing his arms from around Dizzee so it can’t be _that_ bad. 

Well, it might have been a little bad, Dizzee admits, when Thor falls off the bed, his numb foot giving in under his weight.

Laughing, Dizzee helps him up. “You can sit on me tonight,” he says cheekily and wanders off. 

Behind him, Thor yells, “That better be a promise!” And Dizzee laughs again.

 ---

Quietly, Dizzee hangs the phone back on its hook. For a moment, he rests with his shoulder against the damp inside of the phone booth, the drizzle outside beating a muffled tattoo against the yellow metal. He feels every single mile between himself and New York like a spool of thread unraveling within his chest. 

It’s the middle of the afternoon over there and nobody’s answering the phone. Even the shop’s phone went unanswered when he tried it, the numbers etched into his muscle memory. What it means, he’s not sure – they could just be out, something could have happened to make them shut down for the day. Ra-Ra’s girlfriend might have given birth a few weeks early.

Dizzee thinks he should be able to feel it, maybe – some kind of internal neon sign with the words “ _you’re an uncle!”_ turning on. But maybe it’s just wishful thinking. They’ll call him when it happens, he’s sure. He thinks.

Watching the raindrops slide slowly across the grimy plastic windows of the boot while the damp settles into his bones, Dizzee realizes he hasn’t seen New York in nearly two years.

He walks slowly back to the gallery further down the street. Vivienne’s come all the way from Paris to see him even though Dizzee teases her about her dramatic measures of distance. He and Thor didn’t make the drive from there to Berlin in just ten hours. It’s one of the things about Europe he’s not quite used to yet.

She’s in the front room when he slips back in the door, recognizable from miles away with the chunky black sunglasses perched in her short hair and the huge men’s suit carelessly draped across her tiny frame. He slips his arm in under hers and considers the large canvas in front of them.

“What do you think?” he asks her mildly.

She breathes in deeply around her cigarette while she thinks. He can already feel the stench of the Gauloises seeping into his clothes and hair. He’s missed her.

“It’s sad,” she says. He snorts.

“Rude.”

“Oh, shut up.” She gesticulates with the hand holding the cigarette and he plucks it out of her hand before she flicks ash everywhere. “It’s good, you know it is, but it’s so sad. Melancholic. Dark.”

He takes a drag and nearly chokes on it. Gauloises are the reason he more or less kicked the habit back in Paris. “Well, they’re all in the shadow.”

She pinches him in the side through his purple jumpsuit and he wiggles out of her grasp. “You’ve gained weight,” she observes and finally pulls him into a hug. “Good. You’d gotten so skinny." 

“Thor has taken up cooking.” 

She eyes him critically. “Wouldn’t that have the opposite effect?”

“He’s gotten quite good, really. Well, after a few false starts.”

“If you say, Rumi,” she says, clearly not believing him. He can picture Thor’s mock-insulted expression and it makes his smile twitch into a grin. Thor’s father would be revolving in his grave if he knew that his only son was turning out to be a more than capable homemaker and Thor takes great pride in it. “I want this painting. What do you call it?”

He looks back at the painting, its shadowy felines with glowing eyes, shades of gray. There’s half an unfinished letter scribbled in the background. It really is sad. “The never-ending melancholy of shadowy panthers,” he says. Vivienne doesn’t laugh, only steals back her cigarette, and her silence makes the name ring truer than he intended. He shifts, uncomfortable.

“Put it aside for me,” she says. “Now, where is that boy of yours? I haven’t seen him since that _terrible_ haircut.”

“I like his haircut,” Dizzee protests mildly. “In the studio, last I saw. Contemplating the virtues of burnt orange.”

Well, kind of. Thor had been cursing out the color in a very creative manner, in any case, while trying to get it out of his chest hair and nearly pulling it out instead. As Dizzee was throwing his stuff together hurriedly, already late for his appointment at the gallery, Thor had explicitly forbidden studio sex ever again. 

Dizzee hadn’t taken it too seriously. They’ve both put down bans on sex in their working space a number of times before after a matching number of paint-related incidents – and, one memorable time, a paint roller-related one – but they never seem to last very long. Some people ( _Thor_ ) might say that that’s specifically Dizzee’s fault but clearly that’s thoughtlessly discounting the way that some people’s ( _Thor’s_ ) arms look while hauling around paint buckets. And their shoulders. And pecs. And –

“Stop thinking about Thor’s ass,” Vivi says, exasperated.

“I’m not,” Dizzee says, lying.

Vivi just rolls her eyes – clearly she knows him too well – and orders him to show her around the rest of the gallery. She keeps him for another two hours, finally letting him go after she harangues the gallery owner into some multilingual art argument that Dizzee would normally let himself get caught up in too but –

He realizes, leaning against a table as the other two talk post-modernist literature’s influence on European art, that he’s tired. Tired like he hasn’t been in a long time, and hungry, and just good old-fashioned _beat_.

Exchanging cheek kisses with Vivienne, he promises to meet her again tomorrow and to bring his boy, and waves goodbye to Andreas, the gallery owner, who’s building up an alarming facial shade of red.

Vivi’ll have him wrapped around her little finger by tomorrow, Dizzee’s willing to bet on it.

He throws a last glance at the painting Vivi’s reserved before he walks out the door. It makes something bitter rise at the back of his throat. Suddenly, he hates it, hates the glowing eyes and the thick grays that seem to weigh down the canvas. He turns his back on it decisively.

He takes the U-Bahn home instead of walking. When he closes his eyes, the rustling and wobbling of the underground train carries his mind three thousand miles away, and when he opens his eyes again as his stop approaches he’s almost surprised to find himself still in Germany.

Each step he takes, up the stairs to the streets, past the same blocks he walks every day, they all make his feet fall a little heavier. He’s almost curious at himself. He wants to file this feeling away for later so that he can explore it again when he’s not feeling quite so run down. When he finally reaches his apartment block he almost sits down at the stoop. The thought of climbing four flights of stairs is overwhelming.

He manages, though, hauling himself all the way up the creaking stairwell, one hand firmly on the bannister to keep himself upright. He nods politely at Mr. Körner on the second floor who barely manages a nod back. The old man seems to do nothing but sit on a small stool in his doorway, waiting for Dizzee solely so he can glare at him. Though Dizzee had told him not to bother, Thor had spoken to their landlady about the old man, agitated on Dizzee’s behalf. The landlady had said something to the extent of _“don’t mind him, he’s old and weird”,_ and Thor had returned from the conversation with the muscles in his jaw bunched tight.

He feels Mr. Körner’s eyes on him all the way up the stairs, their weight almost pulling him back down again.

It’s only when he’s shouldering open his front door that the smell hits him. It’s delicious, rich with flavor, and there’s something so, so familiar about it that he can’t quite put his finger on. It takes him a moment as he sheds his jacket, moving towards the sounds the muffled sounds coming from the kitchen, the sizzle of a pan mixing with the music from the radio.

He pauses in the doorway. Thor is moving easily around the kitchen, humming along to Prince and the Revolution as he checks a slip of paper he’s taped to the fridge before carefully measuring out some seasoning in the palm of his hand. He looks at home here in between their pots and pans – when did they even get them all? – and Dizzee remembers the one time he visited Thor’s family home. It was back before Thor’s dad got sick. They’d been moving into their first real apartment and had only been there to pick up the last of Thor’s things, even though he hadn’t actually lived there for years. The house had been beautiful and deathly quiet. That night Dizzee had brought Thor over for his first Kipling family dinner. It had been the first of many, and seeing him flushed with happiness in the chaos of Adele’s kitchen had been worth every sacrifice Dizzee had been prepared to make but thankfully didn’t have to.

That’s when it hits him, the familiarity, the _smell_ – it smells just like his mom’s kitchen. And oh god, it smells like his grandma’s kitchen. It smells like a thousand memories, and it smells like love, and family, and the breath Dizzee tries to take in gets tangled somewhere in his throat and almost comes out a sob.

Thor turns at the sound, eyebrows drawing down in a frown. “Dizz? Hey, what’s wrong?” he asks, and Dizzee doesn’t _know_ , is the thing, he doesn’t. In two steps, Thor’s in front of him, hands cold on his cheeks. It’s weird because Thor’s hands are usually so warm but then Dizzee realizes that it’s his own cheeks that are burning hot.

It probably has something to do with the tears that are rolling down them. 

Thor is muttering, “Dizz, Dizzee, what’s wrong, babe,” but all Dizzee can focus on is the small smudge of burnt orange under Thor’s earlobe. Dizzee’s heart feels like it’s surrounding his whole body and then some, like he could power the entire city, the whole world with the force of each heartbeat.

“I’m just happy,” he manages to mumble, hands clenching in the cloth of Thor’s short t-shirt, “and sad, too, but I don’t think I knew until just now.”

“What happened?” 

“It smells like my mom’s kitchen in here,” Dizzee tells him honestly.

“Well, that’s kinda what I was going for,” Thor says and he looks a little – sheepish. Why does he look sheepish?

“What d’you mean?” Dizzee asks and Thor tugs him over to the fridge so he can see the small recipe. And that’s – that’s his mom’s handwriting.

“You’ve been so homesick,” Thor says and Dizzee thinks, oh, he has, hasn’t he? “And I didn’t know what to do cause – you didn’t what to go home, and I couldn’t bring all your family here either so I thought, maybe I could bring a little bit of your home here. Your mom agreed.” 

“I can’t believe you got my mom involved,” Dizzee says and starts crying again. Then he starts laughing at the look of pure panic on Thor’s face. “I can’t believe you learned to cook.”

“I don’t really know what I’m doing.” Thor leans his head against Dizzee’s and says quietly, “I never really felt at home anywhere until I met you, you know. I just wanted to be able to give you a little of the same.”

Dizzee remembers how he thought about the difference in how he and Thor defined home. Maybe they’re not so different after all. Right here in this small run-down apartment in a strange country he suddenly feels more at home than he has in years. 

“It worked,” Dizzee tells him. Thor’s responding smile makes Dizzee’s soul sing, makes him feel close to flying. “Thank you.”

They both lean in for the same kiss, Dizzee’s hands settling at the bare small of Thor’s back. Thor keeps stroking his thumbs over Dizzee’s cheeks even though they’re dry by now as he presses sweet kisses to Dizzee’s smiling mouth.

“So, what’re you making?” Dizzee asks when Thor finally lets him breathe.

Thor stiffens. Then he exclaims – rather high-pitched, “The chicken!” and all but shoves Dizzee out of the way to get to the oven.

And Dizzee – Dizzee can’t help laughing as Thor swears and flails about, trying to avoid burning both himself and the chicken. There’s happiness erupting from his chest into the tips of his fingers and toes. There’s still a tinge of sadness somewhere, recognizable now that it has a name, but it doesn’t matter right now. He feels so light that he might just float away but for the moment he stays here, right at home.

\---

Today I wake up empty and frightened. Don’t go to the door of the study and read a book. Instead, take down the dulcimer, let the beauty of what you love be what you do. There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again.

Rumi

**Author's Note:**

> So, this fic is set around 1984. The 80s West Berlin was really a creative whirlpool for experimental music and art. Many international artists (Bowie, Iggy Pop, Keith Haring, Nick Cave, etc.) lived there or visited in this period, particularly Kreuzberg, which today (much like similar areas in other major cities) has gone through major gentrification. Clubs like Dschungel and Risiko were real, and used to cater to all sorts of musical tastes, sexualities, styles, ethnicities, etc. Thierry Noir and Christophe Bouchet are real street artists who used to paint on the Berlin Wall. Dizzee quotes Samuel Beckett's Worstward Ho.
> 
> Some notes about fashion: 80s fashion is hilarious and great and you bet I have an entire pinterest gallery for “research purposes”. Please imagine that Thor rocking [this](https://www.pinterest.dk/pin/807692514397140009/) outfit throughout this fic. Dizzee’s dreadlocks are in particular inspired by [this](https://davidcharlesfox.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/jean-michel-basquiat-first-exhibition-768x520.jpg) photo of Basquiat (note his work Charles the First to the right), [this](https://www.pinterest.dk/pin/566820303097609596/) is his purple jumpsuit, and [these](https://www.pinterest.dk/pin/566820303097623597/) are probably The Pants.
> 
> My headcanon is that the boys were discovered by French photographers and went to Europe for a while. Dizzee’s experiences as a Black man in Europe is based on many long conversations I’ve had with friends about their experiences with racism here, especially my dear friend J. Love you.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!


End file.
